Friday, November 02, 2007

Vouchers

Some folks have suggested that vouchers don't "work," by which they apparently mean that vouchers haven't, all by themselves, eliminated the racial achievement gap in education. I'd like to make two points about this:

1. Who ever said that test scores are the sole end of education? That certainly doesn't seem to be the attitude among liberals whenever the topic is anything besides vouchers and charter schools. In fact, I'd say that the strongest case for vouchers is equity, autonomy, and choice -- all of which are values that liberals claim to support in other areas. See James Forman's excellent article, "The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First.

2. Even if you dismiss all of the above evidence and think that test scores are the sole measure of success, the scholarly literature is sometimes ambiguous but often positive on the question of test scores. There are severalstudiesshowing at least modestincreases in test scores from vouchers, or from Catholic schools more generally. For example, Angrist et al. had a couple of papers in the American Economic Review; see here and here. They found that a large voucher program in Colombia, with lottery assignment, caused a 0.2 standard deviation increase in test scores, along with a 15-20% increased chance of graduating from high school. Vouchers are no panacea, but no one ever said they were. The point is, if you dismiss these results as insignificant (substantively, not statistically), you'll also have to dismiss pretty much every liberal educational policy that has ever been tried.

2 Comments:

I think the opposition to vouchers is, in the end, more ideological than interest-based or anything else. And I don't mean "ideological" in any pejorative sense (really!) but only in the sense that voucher opponents really, truly believe that public schools (or "common schools", as many will call them) are crucial to a prospering republic. Without these "common" institutions of education, we can't have a united citizenry, they'll say. *Even if* they accept the idea that educational outcomes will improve with vouchers, they'll still oppose them on moral-political grounds. What needs deconstructing is this "myth" of public schools....